Fresh year, freshmen: Breaking habits

As the school year creeps in and we all wrap up whatever show we’ve been binge watching on Netflix and scratch off another day until football season, it’s time to get back into the zone and prepare ourselves for the 10-month scholarly grind. For freshman especially, the feeling of coming back to school is often a mixture of excited apprehension and that of a conquering hero. Either way, there was sure to have been some bad habit accumulated during the trials of last year, and before this school year starts is as good a time as any to break them.

Staying up at unreasonable hours in the morning:

You’re not an insomniac because you can’t sleep. Try lying down with your eyes closed for 30 minutes. Snapchat, Twitter and Instagram aren’t popping in the afterhours and there’s nothing on Netflix worth staying up past 2 a.m. to see when it’ll be just as available in the morning. If the traditional remedies of counting sheep and drinking warm milk aren’t soporific enough for you, try reading your textbook or listening to a recording of that day’s lecture. Worse case, just give yourself 30 minutes unplugged from everything. You’ll be out in less than 10.

Sending mass emails:

We didn’t know you existed before and your sudden bursting onto our plain of existence with a heads up about your recent absence doesn’t compel us to send you our notes. Even though we’re all in this together as far as graduating and enjoying the experience of being a Seminole, it’s every man and woman for himself out here. Buy the notes or phone a friend. Sometimes the greatest asset in a class isn’t the teacher or your textbook, it’s the random guy or girl you sat next to on the first day and made a sacred blood pact with to help each other out. Just don’t flood your classmates notifications.

Cafeteria pranks:

The days of grossing your friends out by eating a motley of things that shouldn’t be mixed are over. The same goes for walking from the cafeteria and dropping ketchup packets in the hallway. Eating may be the one of the few stress free moments for your classmates, don’t take it away from them with your shenanigans.

Underestimating your classes:

The kid who studied half an hour before the exam—if he studied at all—may have tooted his horn about his straight-As in high school, and while there are still a handful of kids gifted enough to pull this off in college, but they’re few and far between. Not every class is going to be grueling, but the worst thing you can do is underestimate a test, fail and begin the semester with a low grade. Especially if it’s one of those classes in which the grade is based on a few tests. The Hail Mary plays you pulled in the last days of the quarter may have done you well in high school but there isn’t much room for last second turnarounds here.

Groveling to your professor for extra credit is futile:

You can kick, scream, cry, even try to bribe (this is not advised though), it won’t do you any good. Your high school teachers weren’t bluffing when they warned you that you were getting it easy. 89.5s on projects can be the difference between an A and a B, but the vast majority of your professors have little time to deal with student’s indivdual grading crises.

It may tick you off at first, but you’ve got to understand that you’re in the big leagues now, and every little grade counts.

Asking the teacher to return to a previous slide:

You had four years to get note taking down pat. Not only that, but you probably have a camera phone on your lap and a powerpoint on Blackboard to reference.

It’s 2015, there’s too much technology available for you to disrupt the flow of the class. With Google, PDFs and texting, asking to go back on a slide is as archaic as asking your professor to write more legibly on the chalkboard.